The Japanese have always had a warm spot in our hearts. Their advanced mobile devices, awesome culture, sublime cuisine, and overall quirkiness, make us want to live there if it wasn’t for the language barrier. Now we’re hearing even more wacky news from the Land of the Rising Sun: Kumiko Kudo, 44 year old owner of the Green Gables bakery, got a custom order in October 2008 from a client who wanted to give her husband a cookie in the shape of an iPod. Kumiko isn’t that tech savvy and by accident she made an iPhone instead, but the client was so pleased with the final result that it didn’t matter. A couple of years later some random lady who heard about the iPhone cookie via word of mouth got one for her boss, Kazuyo Katsuma, a well known economist, and singer Komi Hirose, who helped create a book about the social network Twitter. All it took was a few tweets and now Kumiko can’t keep up with the demand.
She says she can only make 20 per day, since she meticulously applies icing to the chocolate base that makes up the cookie. This isn’t your typical factory stamped biscuit. The cookies measure 12 cm long and 6 cm wide, a little larger than the actual iPhone, and they’re selling for 2,730 yen Japanese yen or roughly $33. In March she personally delivered her cookies to the President of Japanese operator Softbank, who sells the iPhone, and he was so delighted that he said he couldn’t eat it. When asked about this iPad, Kumiko says it’s rather large, and she’s tried to make it into a delicious treat, but the final result ends up being too heavy and it’s rather difficult to make.
I’m sure these things taste heavenly, but $33 is a bit steep; would you buy one?
Update: 20 cookies a day, $33 each, 5 day work week, that’s $3300 a week. Time to take some baking classes.
[Image via LiveJournal]